I haven’t been everywhere but I’ve been some places, some pretty good places. At the top of the Eiffel Tower. in the labyrinth of the Dorsodura in Venice, gazing down into the belly of the Coliseum in Rome. idling on Carnaby Street in London and Central Park in New York and meandering without purpose in Amsterdam. I’ve been on a thousand thrill rides and in a thousand carnival fairways and more houses of horrors than churches but I don’t think of them all that often. When my mind wants to go to somewhere special, some place that has value, like treasure, like magic… I find myself in the most mundane of places. With my mother in the supermarket as a kid in the 60s or watching my then-girlfriend/now-wife water plants on the fire escape of her then-apartment on the Upper East Side in the late 90s (a moment that lasted for mere seconds, but which has stayed with me for nearly 20 years), or gazing at the green, green grass of a field somewhere one day in the 70s, or feeling the first breeze of summer come in through the open window of my Yorkville tenement apartment on some anonymous Saturday morning of the New Millennium, a day which holds for me no other memories. I remember colors and smells and far off sounds and what was on the radio that one time and I think it’s this inclination towards favoring sensation over sensational that brings me back to the films of Jim Akin. The LA-based filmmaker’s second feature, THE OCEAN OF HELENA LEE (2015), is having its world premiere at the Egyptian Theatre (under the auspices of the American Cinematheque) in Hollywood on Friday, May 8th, at 7:30pm. [...MORE]

Run All Night is a movie about tired men forced into motion. Ed Harris and Liam Neeson are happiest when sitting down, but their violent past conspires against their leisure, pitting them against each other in a fleet, melancholy NYC thriller. In theaters now, it is the third collaboration between director Jaume Collet-Serra and Neeson (following Unknown (2011) and Non-Stop (2014)), and they have proven to be ideal, adaptive collaborators. Unknown was adventurous in its Berlin location-shooting and experiments in POV. DP Flavio Labiano shot with a 35mm and Super 16mm camera locked side-by-side, a prism redirecting the same image to both cameras. They underexposed and force-processed the 16mm, creating a “broken but beautiful, dreamy kind of image” that they could use for Neeson’s amnesiac perspective. On Non-Stop they traded location challenges for the constraints of shooting on a single set — the interior of a plane making an international flight. Since it was an Agatha Christie-style whodunit, Labiano used tilt-shift lenses that would localize focus on individuals that Neeson was investigating. The story of Run All Night is less tied to Neeson’s perspective, so it is Collet-Serra’s most expansive, open-air production yet. With DP Martin Ruhe, Collet-Serra isolates Neeson and Joel Kinnaman, playing his son, in high angle establishing shots and CGI transitions that sweep through most of the five boroughs. Run All Night is a city movie, but it’s more about the old NYC that Harris and Neeson carry in their heads than the current metropolis, passing them by.

The art house film calendar that I program goes to press in two days and, although I’m still waiting for some confirmations, I’m sharing the rough-draft with TCM readers, along with some brief thoughts regarding the choices made.

The mind needs structure. So when watching films in quick succession, unexpected linkages emerge, like the strange thematic similarities between Hong Sang-soo’s The Day He Arrives (in theaters now from Cinema Guild) and The Farrelly Brothers’ version of The Three Stooges, discovered while watching them back-to-back over the weekend. The first is a critically-acclaimed art film in limited release, the second the lowest of lowbrow comedies out everywhere, and yet they are both episodic narratives about arrested male development, albeit in different stylistic registers. The Day He Arrives uses a teasingly complex script to lay out the alternate life paths its passive protagonist could have taken, hypnotically acted out with repetitive gestures and phrases. The Three Stooges, however,are active participants in their own destruction, eager to endlessly pratfall down the same road to get the eternally recurring nyuk-nyuk inducing result. Two versions of male stupidity, touchingly rendered.

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